General

Background : “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extremeunintelligence (learning difficulties), as well as, to a lesser extent, a form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects. It is via negativa not via positiva. It is meant to select exam-takers, paper shufflers, obedient IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots), ill adapted for “real life”.

The third annual Ron Paul Institute Washington, DC, Peace and Prosperity Conference includes a special focus on the symbiosis between the mainstream media and the warfare state. How does the mainstream media promote war and, conversely, how does the war machine promote the mainstream media? How do the militarist interventionists collude with the mainstream media to prevent alternative media from having a voice? Remember “PropOrNot”? The Atlancic Council? “Hamilton 68”? How does the US government misuse its citizens’ money to propgandize them into supporting endless, winless, pointless wars? To propagandize them into viewing any alternative media questioning the permanent warfare state as “unpatriotic” or even “agents of a foreign power”?

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From the website: The International Conference on Complex Systems is a unique interdisciplinary forum that unifies and bridges the traditional domains of science and a multitude of real world systems. Participants will contribute and be exposed to mind expanding concepts and methods from across the diverse field of complex systems science.

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Pedophrasty

Definition: Argument involving children to prop up a rationalization and make the opponent look like an asshole, as people are defenseless and suspend all skepticism in front of suffering children: nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting. Often done with the aid of pictures.

Can also describe the exploitation of babies by professional beggars who rent them from their parents and use them as potent appendage in their trade(remember that children tend to grow and need to be replaced).

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What is Skin in the Game? The phrase is often mistaken for one-sided incentives: the promise of a bonus will make someone work harder for you. For the central attribute is symmetry: the balancing of incentives and disincentives, people should also penalized if something for which they are responsible goes wrong and hurts others: he or she who wants a share of the benefits needs to also share some of the risks.

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Taleb is a very difficult person to pin down. As Ralph Nader put it last month: “You cannot pigeonhole him!” But I think that introduction to his insight (and foresight) should suffice to convince even those who have never heard of him before that he’s worth listening to.

Taleb is a former trader, a professor at NYU, and the author of several best-sellers including Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, and his just-released Skin in the Game. But perhaps its best to classify him as a “flaneur,” someone who — according to the Oxford Dictionary, “saunters around observing society.”

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From the New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan, a bold new work that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility

In his most provocative and practical book yet,one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life.

As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights:

• For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations.• Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general.• Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others.• You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.• Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines.• True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you’re willing to risk for it.

The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

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The anachronism shown. The Phyla and Waves Models of Classification by Semiticists is not very scientific.

It would be an anachronism to assert that Italian is a dialect of Catalan, but safe to say that Italian comes from Latin. But when it comes to Lebanese (more generally NorthWestern Levantine), the “politically correct” Arabist-think-tank view is that is is derived from Arabic (Lebanese “dialect” of Arabic) to accommodate sensitivities — even linguists find arguments to violate the arrow of time to serve the interest of panArabism. In situations where there are similarities between a word used in Leb and Arabic, they insist it comes from Arabic not from a common root. (Most Lebanese are confused by diglossia as one is not supposed to write in the spoken language).